All really great flying adventures begin at dawn,” wrote Stephen Coonts in his cross-country odyssey Cannibal Queen, and those words were all I was thinking about as I drove to the airport with the sun still hiding and the new day before me.
I first heard about Amelia Earhart three years ago on Facebook. The new Amelia Earhart, that is.
The sky isn’t falling on the LSA phenomenon, though daily reports of global financial megadoom continue apace.
It’s ironic that even in a multimillion-dollar aircraft, the ultimate cockpit situational awareness comes through a pair of headsets that can be anything from an $80 pair of eBay budget buys to $1,100 ANR big-namers.
The airplane had been climbing through 8,000 feet out of Baghdad for Bahrain when it was hit in the left wing by a shoulder-launched, surface-to-air missile, fired by a Fedayeen terrorist.
According to a search of NTSB data, in 2010, there were only four general aviation fixed-wing accidents investigated that involved in-flight engine compartment fires.
I was tired. No, beyond tired. I was fairly well-whipped. There are no legal limits imposed on flight hours associated with ferry flying, and stupidly.
We’re skimming low over the Atlantic Ocean, some 80 miles southeast of Fort Lauderdale. Below us is a giant marble—brilliant glass with swirls of every shade of blue and green you can imagine, and flattened so it stretches as far as the eye can see.
The benchmarks of speed in general aviation have traditionally been easy to define.
Among pilots, hope isn’t the only thing that springs eternal; it’s the next plane.
The green fields, most looking as if you could land a 747 on them, stretched off into the distance, where they became low, gently rolling hills.
Most pilots know what it feels like when an airplane is wing heavy because there’s more fuel on one side than the other.
Imagine this: You make a two-point landing…or a four-point!
Yeah, I know: It’s officially AirVenture. But to a lot of folks, the name just hasn’t clicked.
The success of the long-running Cheers TV show, I’m convinced, came in no small part from the seductive lines in that great theme song that so well captured the spirit of the show.
The NTSB says cockpit recorders might have helped shed better light on exactly what happened in the accident in which former U.S.
Single-engine turboprops are a relatively recent development in general aviation.
Economies rise and fall like ocean waves. Headlines blare about this debt crisis and that stock market selloff, and through it all we keep on keeping on: That’s what humans do.